Letter: Culleny covered it

In response to Steve Crowningshield’s critique of Jim Culleny’s letter, yes, capitalism allowed us to fund a war, an illegal war, killing over one million Iraqis including over 100,000 children by American ammo (called collateral damage), 5,000 Americans, and leaving a tribal revolution considerably worse off than before U.S. big oil prompted our defense department to deploy. Current administrations have the reputation of releasing their military might only for the profit of the already wealthy. Keeping this succinct, I would like to quote Mr. Culleny’s remarks from his op. ed.:

“Simple fact: capitalism won the argument it had with socialism and communism. Capitalism has been running things for a long time. It ran them even before the Soviet Union folded in 1991 and has been running them in spades ever since. Even the last big “communist” state, China, is nothing but top-down capitalism writ large. In fact, there would not be much difference between a government run exclusively by the Koch brothers (does Mr. Crowningshield know who they are?) and one run by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang — we’re pretty much there already!

“So I’d love to have capitalists stop dancing around what’s causing the Earth to warm, our seas to become sewers, our fish stocks to diminish, our food supply to be monopolized and made unhealthful by fewer and fewer huge agribusinesses, our electoral system to be bought and paid for by the richest among us, news sources so vital to a functioning democracy owned by fewer and fewer of the richest Americans and our basic right to health care equity controlled by profit-making organizations … the beat and social crimes go on.”

It’s a lot of words. But it covers so many ugly, undeniably documented truths. I challenge Mr. Crowningshield to address these specific exposures. I’m waiting …